The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense

by M. J. Rose

  As the others entered, Abu set to explaining that they were now standing in the funeral chamber and pointed out the brightly colored murals. One showed the deceased dressing a large statue of a man with a jackal’s head, placing food at the man-beast’s feet. Slightly behind him, a lithe and lovely woman in a transparent gown held a tray of bottles. In the next scene, she was lighting a censer, the smoke becoming visible. In the next panel, the jackal stood among jars, presses, and alembics, objects that L’Etoile recognized from his father’s perfume shop back in Paris.

  L’Etoile knew how important fragrance was to ancient Egyptians, but he’d never seen this much imagery relating to the making or using of scent before.

  “Who is this man buried here?” Napoléon asked Abu. “Can you tell yet?”

  “Not yet, Général,” Abu answered. “But we should find more clues there.”

  Abu pointed toward the center of the room.

  The stylized black granite sarcophagus was five times the size of an ordinary man. Its polished surface was carved with cartouches and inlaid with a turquoise and lapis portrait of a beautiful, catlike man with blue water lilies around his head. L’Etoile recognized him. He was Nefertum, son of Iset. The god of perfume.

  The scenes in the murals, the motif of lilies, the censers in all the corners of the room, suddenly made sense to L’Etoile. This was the tomb of an ancient Egyptian perfumer. And judging from its majesty, the priest had been revered.

  Saurent barked out orders to his team of workers, and after a brief struggle, the young men lifted the stone lid. Nestled inside was a wide wooden coffin painted with still more scenes of the two people represented in the murals. This cover they were able to pry off without much difficulty.

  Inside was an oversize mummy, oddly shaped—the right length but too wide by half—blackened with asphalt from the Dead Sea. Instead of only one, it wore two elaborate gold masks. Both were crowned with headdresses of turquoise and lapis and wore carnelian, gold and amethyst breastplates. The only difference between them was that the one on the right was male and the one on the left, female.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Abu uttered in hushed astonishment.

  “What does it mean?” Napoléon asked.

  “I don’t know, Général. It’s most unusual,” Abu stammered.

  “Unwrap him, Saurent,” Napoléon ordered.

  Despite Abu’s protestations, Saurent insisted the young men cut through the linen and expose the actual mummy. The Frenchman was paying them, so they agreed. As L’Etoile knew, ancient embalming techniques using fragrant oils and unguents along with the dry air should have prevented the deceased’s soft muscles and tissue from decaying. Even the hair might have been preserved. He’d seen mummies before and had been fascinated by their sweet-smelling corpses.

  It took only a few minutes to cut and peel back the blackened cloth.

  “No. Like nothing I have ever seen,” Abu whispered.

  The corpse on the right didn’t have his arms crossed on his chest, as was the custom. Instead his right hand was extended and holding the hand of a woman with whom he’d been mummified. Her left hand was knotted with his. The two lovers were so lifelike, their bodies so uncorrupted, it appeared they had been buried months ago, not centuries.

  The assembled crowed murmured with amazement at the sight of this couple intertwined in death, but what affected L’Etoile was not what he saw. Here at last was the fountainhead of the odor that had begun to tease him as he’d climbed down the ladder.

  He struggled to separate out the notes he recognized from the ones he didn’t, searching for the ingredients that gave the blend its promise of hope, of long nights and voluptuous dreams, of invitation and embrace. Of an everlasting covenant ripe with possibility. Of lost souls reunited.

  Tears sprang to the perfumer’s eyes as he inhaled again. This was the kind of scent he’d always imagined capturing. He was smelling liquid emotion. Giles L’Etoile was smelling love.

  The perfumer was desperate. What gave this fragrance its complexity? Why was it so elusive? Why couldn’t he recognize it? He’d smelled and memorized over five hundred different ingredients. What was in this composition?

  If only there were a machine that would be able to take in the air and separate out the components it contained. Long ago, he’d spoken to his father about such a thing. Jean-Louis had scoffed, as he did at most of his son’s inventions and imaginings, chastising him for wasting time on impractical ideas, for indulging in foolish romanticism.

  “Perfume can evoke feelings, Papa,” L’Etoile had argued. “Imagine what a fortune we’d make if we were selling dreams and not just formulations.”

  “Nonsense,” his father admonished. “We are chemists, not poets. Our job is to mask the stench of the streets, to cover the scent of the flesh and relieve the senses from the onslaught of smells that are unpleasant, vile and infected.”

  “No, Father. You’re wrong. Poetry is the very essence of what we do.”

  Despite his father’s opinion, L’Etoile was certain that there was more that scent could offer. That it had a deeper purpose. It was why he had come to Egypt. And he’d discovered that he was right. Ancient perfumers had been priests. Perfume was part of holy rituals and religious customs. The soul rose to the heavens on the smoke from incense.

  The general came closer to inspect the mummies. As he reached down into the coffin, Abu muttered a warning. Napoléon waved off the cautionary words and lifted a small object out of the male mummy’s hand. “How extraordinary,” he said as he extracted an identical piece of pottery from the female’s hand. “They are each holding one of these.” He opened the first pot, then the second. A moment passed. He sniffed the air. Then he lifted each pot to his nose, smelling one and then the other.

  “L’Etoile, they seem to contain an identical perfumed substance.” He gave one of the pots to him. “Is this a pomade? Do you recognize it?”

  The container was small enough to fit in his hand. Glazed white, it was decorated with elaborate coral and turquoise designs and hieroglyphs that encircled its belly. The lost language of the ancients no one could read. But one L’Etoile could surely smell. He touched the waxy surface. So this, here in his hand, was the wellspring of the odor that had drawn L’Etoile toward the chamber.

  He wasn’t prescient. Not a psychic. L’Etoile was sensitive to one thing only: scent. It was why at twenty he’d left Marie-Genevieve and Paris in 1789 for the dry air and heat of Egypt, to study this ancient culture’s magical, mesmerizing smells. But none of what he’d discovered in all that time compared to what he held in his hands.

  Up close, the scent was rich and ripe, and he felt himself float away on its wings, away from the tomb, out into the open, under the sky, under the moon, to a riverbank where he could feel the wind and taste the cool night.

  Something was happening to him.

  He knew who he was—Giles L’Etoile, the son of the finest perfumer and glove maker in Paris. And where he was—with general Napoléon Bonaparte in a tomb under the earth in Alexandria. Yet at the same time, he was transported, sitting beside a woman on the edge of a wide, green river under the shade of date trees. He felt he’d known this woman forever, but at the same time, she was a stranger.

  She was lovely, long and lean with thick, black hair and black eyes that were filled with tears. Her body, enrobed in a thin cotton shift, was wracked with sobs, and the sound of her misery cut through him. Instinctively he knew that something he’d done or hadn’t done was the source, the cause of her pain, and that her suffering was his to quell. He had to make a sacrifice. If he didn’t, her fate would haunt him through eternity.

  He removed the long linen robe he wore over his kilt and dipped a corner into the water so that he could wipe her cheeks. As he leaned over the river, he glimpsed his face in its surface. L’Etoile saw someone he didn’t recognize. A younger man. Twenty-five at most. His skin was darker and more golden than L’Etoile’s. His features w
ere sharp in places where the perfumer’s were round, and his eyes were black-brown instead of light blue.

  “Look,” a voice said from far away, “there is a papyrus here.”

  Dimly, L’Etoile was aware that the voice was familiar: Abu’s. But more pressing was the sudden clatter of horses’ hooves. The woman heard them, too. The panic evident on her face. He dropped the robe and took her hand, raising her up to lead her away from the river and find a place to hide her and keep her safe.

  There was a shout. Someone fell against him. He heard pottery shattering on the alabaster floor. L’Etoile was back in the tomb, and instead of the woman’s lovely, melancholy face, he was looking at Abu, clutching a thick scroll to his chest and staring down at a broken clay pot.

  The scent had sent everyone into a trance, but L’Etoile had come out of it first. All around him, chaos had erupted. Men whispered, wept and screamed, speaking in languages L’Etoile couldn’t understand. They seemed to be battling invisible demons, struggling with hidden foes, comforting and taking comfort from unseen companions.

  What had happened to him? What was happening to the men around him?

  One of the young Egyptian workers was slumped against the wall, smiling and singing a song in some ancient language. Another was lying on the ground moaning; a third was striking out at an invisible assailant. Two of the savants were unaffected but watching in horror. Saurent was kneeling in prayer, a beatific expression on his face, speaking in Latin, reciting a mass. The cartographer was beating on the wall with his fist, crying out a man’s name over and over.

  L’Etoile’s eyes found Napoléon. The general was standing, frozen, by the sarcophagus, staring at a spot on the wall as if it were a window onto a distant vista. His skin was paler than usual, and sweat dotted his brow. He looked sickly.

  There were scents that could cure ills and others that could make you ill, poisons that seduced you with their sweetness before they sucked the breath out of you. L’Etoile’s father had taught him about all of them and warned him about their effects.

  Now, here, he was afraid for himself and for his commander and for the men in this room. Had they all been poisoned by some ancient noxious scent?

  He had to help. Grabbing a small gold box from a pile of treasures against the far wall, he opened it, dumped its contents—gold and colored glass—onto the floor, and then hastily thrust the still-intact clay pot inside. Scooping up the shards of the pot that the general had dropped, L’Etoile added them and slammed the lid shut.

  The scent was still conspicuous, but now that the perfume containers were enclosed, the air slowly began to clear. L’Etoile watched as first one man and then another stood and looked around, each trying to get his bearings.

  There was a loud crash as Napoléon fell onto the wooden coffin, smashing and splintering its cover. The perfumer had heard the rumors that the general suffered from epilepsy, the same nervous disorder that had affected his hero, Julius Caesar. Now froth bubbled from the general’s mouth, and he shook with convulsions.

  His aide-de-camp rushed to his side and bent over him.

  Had the strange perfume brought on this episode? It had certainly affected L’Etoile. The dizziness and disorientation he’d been experiencing since he’d entered this tomb were only now starting to dissipate.

  “This place is cursed!” Abu yelled out as he threw the papyrus scroll back inside the coffin and on top of the desiccated bodies. “We must leave here now!” He rushed out of the inner chamber and down the first corridor.

  “The tomb is cursed,” the young workers repeated with trembling voices as they followed, pushing and shoving each other out through the narrow entryway.

  The savants went next.

  Napoléon’s aide-de-camp helped the general—who had recovered his faculties but was still weak—escorting him out, leaving L’Etoile alone in the burial chamber of the perfumer and the woman who had been entombed with him.

  Bending over the lovers, he grabbed the papyrus scroll that Abu had thrown into the coffin, added it to the contents of the small gold box, and then shoved the box deep inside his satchel.

  Two

  NEW YORK CITY, THE PRESENT

  TUESDAY, MAY 10, 8:05 A.M.

  When Jac L’Etoile was fourteen years old, mythology saved her life. She remembered everything about that year. Especially the things she’d tried to forget. Those she remembered in the most detail. It was always like that, wasn’t it?

  The teenager waiting for her now, outside the TV studio on West Forty-ninth Street, couldn’t be much older than fourteen. Gangly, awkward, but excited and jittery like a young colt, she stepped forward and held out a copy of Jac’s book, Mythfinders.

  “Can I have your autograph, Miss L’Etoile?”

  Jac had just been on a network morning talk show promoting her book, but she wasn’t by any means a celebrity. Her cable show, also titled Mythfinders—exploring the genesis of legends—claimed under a million viewers, so encounters like this were both unexpected and gratifying.

  The town car she’d ordered idled at the curb, the driver standing at the ready by the passenger door. But it didn’t matter if she was a little late. No one but ghosts waited for her where she was going.

  “What’s your name?” Jac asked.

  “Maddy.”

  Jac could smell the light, lemony cologne the girl was wearing. Teenage girls and citron were forever finding each other. Uncapping the pen, Jac started to write.

  “Sometimes it helps to know there really are heroes,” Maddy said in a hushed voice. “That people can really do amazing things.”

  The noisy and crowded street across from Radio City Music Hall was an odd place for a confession, but Jac nodded and smiled at Maddy in complicity.

  She’d known the same hunger far too long.

  When Jac first started exploring the genesis of myths—traveling to ancient sites all over the world; visiting museums, private collections and libraries; searching the ruins of civilizations long gone—she’d imagined her findings would entertain and educate. To that end, she sought out and found the facts at the center of the great fictions, looked for and discovered the life-size versions of the giants in legends. She wrote about how celebrated deeds had in actuality been small acts, sometimes even accidents. Jac reported on how rarely the deaths of mythology’s heroes were grand, metaphoric or meteoric, but instead how storytellers had exaggerated reality to create metaphors that instructed and inspired.

  She believed she was debunking myths. Bringing them down to size. But she wound up doing the opposite.

  The proof that myths were, in fact, based in fact—that some version of ancient heroes, gods, fates, furies and muses really had existed—gave readers and viewers hope.

  And that’s why they wrote Jac fan letters and thank-you notes, why Jac’s TV show was in its second year, and why teenagers like Maddy asked for her autograph.

  And it was why Jac felt like a fraud.

  Jac knew that believing in heroes could save your life but also knew that such belief in grandiose fantasy could destroy it just as easily. She didn’t tell Maddy that. Instead she finished the inscription, handed back the book, thanked her, and then slipped into the waiting car.

  Forty-five minutes later the aroma of towering pines and newly blooming redbud trees informed Jac they’d reached the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, nestled in the lush Hudson River Valley. She looked up from her reading just as the looming wrought-iron gates came into view.

  As the car passed through the entrance, Jac undid and retied the ribbon that kept the wayward curls off her face. Twice. She’d been collecting ribbons since she was a child and had boxes of them: satin, grosgrain, velvet, moiré and jacquard—most found at antique stores in baskets of trimmings. There had been seven yards of this creamy satin on a water-stained spool stamped “Memorial Black.”

  The chauffeur drove down the cemetery’s center road until he came to a fork, and then he took a right. Watching out the window for the fam
iliar granite orb-and-cross rooftop ornament, Jac knotted and unknotted her long white scarf as the driver navigated narrow lane after lane of tombstones, mausoleums and monuments.

  For the last 160 years, all of her mother’s family had been buried in this Victorian cemetery that sat high on a ridge overlooking the Pocantico River. Having so many relatives asleep in this overgrown memorial park made her feel strangely at home. Uncomfortable and uneasy, but at home in this land of the dead.

  The driver pulled up to a grove of locust trees, parked, and came around to open Jac’s door. Her resolve fought her anxiety. She vacillated for only seconds and then got out.

  Under the shade of the trees, Jac stood on the steps to the ornate Greek-style mausoleum and tried the key. She didn’t remember having trouble with the lock before, but there hadn’t been a river of rust flowing from the keyhole last year. Maybe the keyway had corroded. As she jiggled the blade and put pressure on the bow, she noticed how many joints between the stone blocks to the right of the door were filled with moss.

  On the lintel were three bronze heads corroded by the elements. The faces—Life, Death and Immortality—peered down at her. She looked at each as she continued to jiggle the key in the lock.

  The pitting that had attacked Death had, ironically, softened his expression, especially around his closed eyes. The finger he held up to his lips, silencing them forever, was rotting. So was his crown of poppies—the ancient Greek symbol for sleep.

  Unlike his two elderly companions, Immortality was young, but the serpent winding around his head, tail in its mouth, was mottled with black and green deterioration. Inappropriate for an ancient icon of eternity. Only the symbol for the human soul, the butterfly in the middle of Immortality’s forehead, was still pristine.

  Jac’s struggle with the key continued. She was almost giddy at the thought that she’d be denied entry. But the tumblers clicked solemnly, and the lock finally yielded. As she pushed it open, the door’s hinges moaned like an old man. Immediately, the chalky smell of stone and stale air mixed with decayed leaves and dried wood wafted out. The “scent of the forgotten,” Jac called it.